Olives have been on the table for about 35 centuries. Your standard olive is inedible when first harvested in that it contains a large amount of acrid glucosides which are horrendously bitter. To remove this, olives are soaked for a few days in lye (doubtless produced from wood ashes, which added a bit of the flavour of the particular wood). Then they were soaked in brine and finally approached edibility. How they got those little pimento things in the middle is yet to be discovered.

ok it a food thread already--but lots of different cultures have used lye to 'cure food'olives, lukefish, and hominy are the first three that come to mind..

acid and salt are also used.

the romans used a 'fish sauce' that gave every indication of being rotten --except it wasn't-- which was a good thing, since they put the stuff on damn near everything.. (ancient day equivient of the standard american and ketchup)

cheese is just curdled milk that we all agree is edible.. (and the same goes double for 'blue cheeses'.

Once upon a time, a great many years ago, I was serving in Korea and had a task (some heavy lifting) with which some strong young Korean lads assisted. As a thank-you and a treat, I went to the club on the army base and got a couple of pizzas to go. When I returned with Cokes and pizza, the boys were aghast. They loved the Coca Cola, but they asked me, as they sniffed the pizza, how I could eat something that had rotten milk on it.

I, too, hated true/false and multiple choice tests, because all too often the question was not written in such a way that I could really decide on the "answer." I always was finding 'yes, but's and 'only if's and 'all or none of the above's, but in order to make an acceptable grade and continue through the system I would usually make a mark.One of my children, in second grade, wrote ridiculous answers in her reading comprehension test blanks, because..."Why do they ask us such dumb questions?" I loved it!

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